Despite criminal conviction, Sunde wants a seat in European Parliament.

Peter Sunde, the notorious co-founder of The Pirate Bay who somehow has managed to stay out of prison or pay his share of a multi-million dollar fine, has just kicked off his campaign to become a member of the European Parliament.

On Thursday, he released a 30 second campaign video—entitled “Romantic”—which primarily consists of him smiling coyly at the camera with the famed Serge Gainsbourg track “Je t’aime” playing as the soundtrack. Sunde first expressed interest in running nearly a year ago.

Sunde is running as a member of the Pirate Party Finland, but historically the tech-minded party hasn’t done well in Europe or elsewhere. At present, the European Parliament has two Pirate Party members from Sweden. And although he grew up in Sweden, Sunde also has Finnish citizenship.

On April 17, 2009, Sunde and the other three Pirate Bay principals were found guilty of aiding copyright infringement. A Swedish trial court ordered them each to serve a year in prison and to pay a collective fine of 30 million Swedish kronor ($4.5 million). They appealed the verdict. In 2010, a Swedish appellate court reduced their prison sentences to between four and 10 months each. However, their collective fine was later increased to 46 million Swedish kronor ($6.8 million).

They appealed again. In February 2012, the Swedish Supreme Court declined to hear the case, effectively ending the legal battle in Sweden, but the government has had a tough time enforcing its judgment. In March 2013, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously dismissed Sunde’s appeal as “inadmissible,” finding that the existing Swedish conviction did not violate his human rights.

Further Reading

The site's founders have moved out of Sweden, but Stockholm wants them back.

In a Skype text chat with Ars, Sunde said that his standing conviction in Sweden isn’t a barrier to his running for office, nor has it been a barrier for his ability to live and travel throughout Europe.

“Well, I have multiple appeals in and few people looking for me,” he said. “As in, there's no need for me to be in Sweden, and basically no one wants me to go to prison. So no one looks for me outside of Sweden.

“It's quite easy to cross borders in Europe without any controls. And the Nordic Union, don't forget—the Nordic countries has been passport-free since ages before Schengen,” Sunde added. He was referring to the Schengen Agreement, which has effectively eliminated internal passport control within Europe.

Sunde said that he wasn’t sure if there was a warrant out for his arrest in Sweden.

“No idea,” he said. “Probably? Well, besides not being a hard criminal, nor being in Sweden, I also have no €10 million ($13.8 million) to give anyone.”

What warrant?

At present, Sunde lives in Berlin. He admits he hasn’t spent significant time in Finland, the country that he hopes to represent.

Further Reading

“I haven't lived much in Finland, no,” he told Ars. “But I follow Finnish media, I go there often, I have family and friends in Finland. But it doesn't really matter. I would rather see myself as a representative of the one million Finns living abroad. We also need to be heard anyhow.”

In 2012, Sunde was reportedly ordered to report to a prison called Västervik Norra for his eight month sentence. When Sunde and the others didn't report, the Swedish Prison and Probation Service (Kriminalvården) had the responsibility to act.

“If the convicted person does not report to the prison in question at the decided date or before, the Evaluation and Placement group issues a warrant to the local police office,” wrote Andreas Fällström. "The local police search for the convicted person locally and report the result of their search back to the Evaluation and Placement group. If the convicted person has not been encountered, a national domestic warrant to all of Sweden’s police offices is issued. If the criteria for an international warrant lay at hand, an international warrant also is issued in connection with the national warrant.”

Fällström did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment as to how Sunde has been able to elude serving his sentence for so long, whether an arrest warrant has been issued, or if anything would change were Sunde to be elected.

When Ars expressed puzzlement as to how Sunde has been able to elude the Swedish judicial system, he quipped: “You spend more time thinking about my jail time than I do, from the looks of it.”

"Pirate Party is crazy enough to let me run for them"

Still, Sunde admitted that he was unlikely to be voted into office.

“Honestly, don't think I'll get elected,” he said. “But I think it's worth a shot anyhow. The reason is that I want to at least get people's attention on the questions at hand. And of course the first issue would be stopping TTIP in its current form.”

Further Reading

He does comedy, thinks The Pirate Bay should shut down, and distrusts Netflix/Spotify.

The former Pirate Bay spokesperson said that he expected that he would need about 100,000 votes to get elected. Sunde also noted that he was just one of a slate of 19 other candidates from the Pirate Party alone. However, he worries that the Pirate Party’s single-issue politicking—it generally doesn’t have a clear platform on defense, immigration, economics, or other non-tech issues—has hampered its success.

“I agree on the issues at hand, and the Pirate Party is crazy enough to let me run for them,” he said. “It's also a way to influence the Pirate Party. I want Pirate Party internationally to take a stance on other topics as well, such as working for gender equality for instance. I do realize that the Internet is the topic that people voting for me care about, although I would also hope that vegetarianism, gender equality, animal rights, and the other things I work passionately with, are topics that would make people vote for me.”

If his campaign is not successful, Sunde said he will return to his work on the new secure messaging platform, heml.is, “and doing some writing, earning most of my living from consultancy work for database work and such.”

He also said he sometimes works with Flattr (a micropayments platform that he founded), iPredator (a VPN firm), and Karbon Ventures, a United Kingdom-based holding and investment firm.

Even if the information activist isn’t elected to Brussels, Sunde does have a message for all European Union (EU) voters.

“I'd like to ask them all to go and vote, almost no matter what they vote for,” he concluded. “The problem in the EU elections is that so few people care, but 95 percent of legislation in the EU comes from the parliament, so it's more important than national elections.”